The "Childmyths" blog is a spin-off of Jean Mercer's book "Thinking Critically About Child Development: Examining Myths & Misunderstandings"(Sage, 2015; third edition). The blog focuses on parsing mistaken beliefs that can influence people's decisions about childrearing-- for example, beliefs about day care, about punishment, about child psychotherapies, and about adoption.
See also http://thestudyofnonsense.blogspot.com

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Friday, February 17, 2017

Children and Obedience: A Clinician's Perspective

A recent discussion on a child psychology listserv
brought up once again some misunderstandings about Reactive Attachment
Disorder. One correspondent, who spoke of a child who had been diagnosed with
RAD, surprised me by offering the old holding-therapy-related symptom list,
including “superficial charm” and “lack of cause-and-effect thinking”. I
responded by pointing out that even now, when few practitioners do holding
therapy, there are dangers in the associated authoritarian belief system—a
system that considers disobedience a symptom of poor attachment and holds that
once a command is given, a child must be made to comply with it. (This view was
the one that led to the death of Candace Newmaker in a situation which was not
in itself dangerous unless pushed much too far.)

During the ensuing
discussion, some really valuable comments about obedience were made by Dr.
Bradley White, a clinical child psychologist at Virginia Tech, and I asked him
whether I could summarize and quote some of what he said for this blog. In his
very nice message of agreement, Dr. White commented on how much he has learned
about these issues from his own children, but I want to point out that he
learned from them because he was paying
attention, not because he just happened to be in the same house with them!

Dr. White’s remarks stressed what early-childhood
educators call developmentally appropriate practice: the understanding that an
action can have different motives and meaning when performed by a child at
different times in his or her life. When belief systems or associated
treatments assume that all disobedience or noncompliance is pathological, they
fail to take developmental changes into account and therefore lack real
understanding of what the child’s behavior means from his or her own perspective.
These mistakes lead to behavior that fails to provide an adequate model for the
child—often at the same time that the adult is expressing concern about the
child’s lack of empathy.

Dr. White commented: “If one sees noncompliance as
developmentally appropriate and expected, it may simply be accepted and either
ignored or redirected. If it is seen as problematic but functional or
reflecting a skills or knowledge deficit, it may be helpfully viewed as a
learning opportunity requiring extra support including gentle exploration,
guidance, and rehearsal of alternatives.” (When adoptive or foster children
have had few opportunities for leaning about social behavior and social
relations, this viewpoint may be especially helpful. JM) Dr. White pointed out
that when child behavior is always interpreted as provocative or manipulative,
parents may see punishment as the only suitable
response—potentially damaging the child’s attachment relationship with
the adults as well as teaching the child coercive methods for solving problems.
Parents’ interpretation of child behavior helps determine how, and how
effectively, they respond to the behavior.

Commenting that becoming socialized (understanding
social rules and taking the perspectives of other people) takes many years and
progresses slowly, Dr. White also made this important statement: “I think we
adults are … often impaired at seeing the world through the eyes of a child or
adolescent, since it calls for empathic sensitivity and perspective taking,
which often don’t come automatically but require effortful focus. Yet from a
child’s point of view caregivers are often overly demanding and distracted due
to their over-involvement in boring, confusing, or simply weird and senseless
adult-level responsibilities e.g. getting the kids to school on time, holding
down a job, maintaining order and organization), in contrast to the things perfectly reasonable kids care about (e.g.,
eating sweets, sleeping in, grabbing others’ attention with gross/silly/provocative
acts, having fun now, and exploring how the world works by pushing and pulling
on it and tossing it all around the house and yard, etc.).” In addition, Dr.
White pointed out, it’s hard to cope with adult demands when tired, hungry,
excited, and so on—“which arguably summarizes at least half of the day of an
average healthy young child.”

Neither Dr. White nor I wants to argue that children don’t
need to comply with rules and adult requests. Safety alone demands a certain
level of obedience and cooperation, because adults often are able to foresee
dangers that children know nothing about. The point here is that there are many
reasons why a developing child may
sometimes-- perhaps often—fail to comply
with adult rules, ranging from the limited abilities of the young child to the
budding negotiating powers of the preschooler to the growing autonomy of older
children and adolescents.

From a
practical point of view, a partial solution to this problem may be to have few
rules and make few demands, but to follow through carefully on the ones you
have. A corollary of this would be never to institute a rule or make a demand
that cannot be enforced, especially if the issue is that a child is not capable
of obeying. And, of course, working
toward a good, mutually supportive and cooperative relationship between adult and
child will do more good than all the exertion of authority in the world.

It is a huge mistake to define obedience or
disobedience as indications of mental illness or as related to emotional
attachment. Thinking in those terms increases parents’ anxiety and makes them
feel that there is a crisis that must be addressed every time a child fails to
comply. Such anxiety limits the parents’ ability to use the “effortful focus”
Dr. White mentioned. It also makes the parents vulnerable to unconventional and
potentially harmful ideas about children’s mental health.

2 comments:

This was a essay I wanted to share with a Facebook group of adoptive parents in Colorado, a state where Attachment (Holding) Therapy beliefs still survive after "restraint as therapy" was outlawed in 2005.

I personally found that being alert to hunger and fatigue in a young child was one of the most effective things I could do as an amateur single parent. That and timely follow through on consequences.

About Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Mercer

Jean Mercer has a Ph.D in Psychology from Brandeis University, earned when that institution was 20 years old (you do the math). She is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Richard Stockton College, where for many years she taught developmental psychology, research methods, perception, and history of psychology. Since about 2000 her focus has been on potentially dangerous child psychotherapies, and she has published several related books and a number of articles in professional journals.
Her CV can be seen at http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2009/12/curriculum-vitae-jean.mercer-richard.html.